This paper presents a case study of a Bachelor level game research methods course (15 ECTS). The course covers observations, interviews, and introduction to statistical analysis. The course set-up follows constructive alignment design where the aim is that the learning goals, learning tasks, and evaluation are aligned. During the course, students first learn research design and later design their research based on a set of examples and conduct data gathering and analysis. The evaluation of the pedagogical approach used is based on students’ learning diaries where the focus is the methods and applying methods. Qualitative evaluation indicates that students can better describe their research designs and analyses.

This volume is about methods in game research. In game research, wide variety of methods and research approaches are used. In many cases, researchers apply the method set from another discipline to study games or play because game research as discipline is not yet established as its own discipline and the researchers have been schooled in that other discipline. Although this may, in many cases, produce valuable research, we believe that game research qualifies as a research field in its own right. As such, it would benefit game researchers to have collections of relevant research methods described and developed specifically for this type of research. Two direct benefits of this would be to illustrate the variety of methods that are possible to apply in game research and to mitigate some of the problems; each new researchers has to reinvent how methods from other fields can or need to be adjusted to work for game research.

I just got a copy of the special issue Experiencing games: Games, play and players of the Journal of Gaming and Virtual Worlds edited by Waern, Thorhauge, Verhagen, and me (the online version should come out by the end of December).

My article Player Character Engagement in Computer Games came out. Here is the abstract:

This article argues how players can control a player character influence interpretation and facilitate engagement within a game. Engagement with player characters can be goal-related or empathic, where goal-related engagement depends on affects elicited by goal-status evaluations whereas characters facilitate empathic engagement. The concepts of recognition, alignment, and allegiance are used to describe how engagement is structured in games. Recognition describes aspects of character interpretation. Alignment describes what kind of access players have to a character’s actions, knowledge, and affects. Allegiance describes how characters elicit sympathy or antipathy through positive or negative evaluation of the character.

We address the problem of creating human-like, believable behavior for game characters. To achieve character believability in games, the game designer needs to develop that character so that it fulfills as many aspects of believability as possible. With believable behavior we mean that the game is consistently structured in terms of narration or gameplay so that it is possible to build and maintain coherent relations between the actions of the characters. In this paper, we first analyze the general patterns for game characters design in detail concentrating on the aspects that are relevant to the AI design. Then, we present an agent architecture that we are developing, and discuss how this architecture can address the identified design patterns.